They break down something like this: eight novels and one novella (73% of total), two short story collections (18% of total), one play, and one play-short story combo (9% of total). All of it classic or contemporary literary fiction.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

“In those days there was no money to buy books. I borrowed books from the rental library of Shakespeare & Company, which was the library and bookstore of Sylvia Beach at 12 rue de l’Odeon…

“I started with Turgenev and took two volumes of A Sportsman’s Sketches and an early book of D.H. Lawrence, I think it was Sons and Lovers, and Sylvia told me to take more books if I wanted. I chose the Constance Garnett edition of War and Peace, and The Gambler and Other Stories by Dostoyevsky.”

-Earnest Hemingway, in his Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast.

One of the cardinal rules of good writing is to read. A lot. This is our first post in a series that examines the reading habits of some of the greats.

Saturday, April 28, 2012

One of our inaugural posts last November pointed people to the Great Gatsby video game. In the comments of that post I joked that a “first-person hacker” game a la Crime and Punishment might be equally engaging, if a little more violent. Not to be outdone, some enterprising minds at USC have suckered the NEA into a $40,000 grant to develop an online video game based on Henry David Thoreau’s contemplative classic, Walden:

“The player will inhabit an open, three-dimensional game world which will simulate the geography and environment of Walden Woods.”

Friday, April 27, 2012

Alas, it's time to look at a first line from a reputable novel once again. And this novel is very reputable. Of course, it's none other than Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying," which commences as follows:

"Jewel and I came up from the field, following the path in single file."

Now, I have the same sentiments toward this first line as I do the rest of the novel; indifference. This first line does nothing for me, although I find it acceptable. Simply acceptable. Not stellar, not intriguing, not even interesting. I struggle with ol Faulkner (perhaps because I am a self-proclaimed Hemingway-phile). Perhaps I have lost my mind and am just now exposing my literary merit as weak, but Faulkner, to me, is simply bleh.

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Welcome back to ShelfActualization's monthly short story club. This month, we have a dandy. To start, look at this opening line:

"When I found the sewer pipe I was happy, but I couldn't smile."

Beautiful, short, and altogether intriguing. But the rest of the story is what really burns me up. I've been fascinated by this story for years simply because it takes an otherwise ordinary, or even sub-ordinary, situation (that of digging a trench outside of Paris to locate a buried sewer pipe) and converts this ordinary situation into an immense moment of profundity.

All of a sudden down in this ordinary trench with a shovel and pick ax, we are dealing with a myriad of profound human experiences. For example:

Identity ("The other man was me, a thirty-two year old Italian laborer . . . At midday, between mouthfuls of highly spiced watery soup, we talked for a while in our rudimentary common French, then each returned to his own thoughts in his mother tongue.")

Sanity ("At the end of the first week the man who was with me started to crack . . . 'Trouve? Tu l'as trouve?' the hoarse voice of a lost man, the common exhalation of the trenches of the century.")

Death ("I assured him that if the trench were going to collapse it would do so only at night, when the damp came . . . one shouldn't speak of death with one's foot in the grave.")

Socioeconomics ("But why should a man have to suffer this way? Why in the world should a human being have to earn bread for his children with a noose around his neck?")

Free Will ("Then I decided that he was no help to me - I would manage better on my own. So, in front of the other workers, I asked [the boss] to let me finish the job alone."

Thus we have an ordinary situation laced with profound themes. And so, my conclusion is this: The Trench masterfully portrays the immensity of a mundane moment in a trench with a shovel under the French sky. And why do we not notice more often the immensity of mundane moments in our own lives?

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Welcome (again) to ShelfActualization.com's Short Story Club. This month's selection comes to us from arguably the most over-trodden god-forsaken country of Europe: Italy.

But, in spite of my low-level contempt for Italy, I find this month's short story selection very relevant. Erri De Luca published The Trench in the March 2006 edition of The New Yorker. I am assuming most of us are completely unacquainted with Erri De Luca, so let's have a quick look: Born in 1950 in Naples, he has become a radical left wing idealist. He has worked in Italy and France as a truck driver and mason. Now considered to be a recluse, he lives in an isolated cottage in the hills far outside of Rome.

Now again, he is Italian. So that sucks. But let's get over it. Here is the link to The Trench. We'll meet back here tomorrow to discuss. I couldn't look forward to it more than I currently do.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

We
haven’t forgotten about you, Literary Death Match fans. We’ve simply had to postpone
our next match a couple of weeks while ringside reporter Kelly Wallace continues to recover from injuries sustained in the last title bout.

But while you wait for the highly-anticipated
Bronte sister beat-down, we thought we’d point you to another head-to-head
match up playing out over at the Millions. They asked the experts who’s greater,
Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. It's definitely worth a read.

Sunday, April 22, 2012

Well, it only took four episodes for Mad Men to stroke our curiosity of a few weeks ago. Closetfictioneers, all is well; account man Ken Cosgrove is writing again.

Last week we learned that he has begun training his fiction-writing fetish on the science-fiction & fantasy genre, under the pen name of Ben Hargrove. We got the description of one story titled “The Punishment of X4” wherein a robot who maintains a commuter bridge between two planets removes a bolt that brings the whole thing crashing down. Genius.

He’s publishing in magazines, pitching an anthology to Farrar Strauss, and things generally seem to be looking up for him until Roger makes it clear that he is to stop moon-lighting and focus on his day-job. Ken dutifully kills off the Hargrove alias, and with it, his foray into genre fiction.

But he’s far from giving up his one true passion. Ken takes up a new pseudonym, Dave Algonquin, and the episode ends as he scribbles the opening lines of his newest short story, “The Man With the Miniature Orchestra.”

“There were phrases of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony that still made Coe cry. He always thought it had to do with the circumstances of the composition itself. He imagined Beethoven, deaf and soul-sick, his heart broken, scribbling furiously while Death stood in the doorway clipping his nails. Still, Coe thought, it might have been living in the country that was making him cry. It was killing him with its silence and loneliness, making everything ordinary too beautiful to bear.”

Anyone want to take a crack at finishing that one off? I’d get a kick out of reading it.

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Sometimes we
become so immersed in the distinctiveliterary voiceof an author, that when we
hear that same author's actual speaking voice, it can be a little jolting. My little brother forwarded me this interview at the
passing of Mike Wallace last week. Take a moment to soak up Ayn Rand’s arrant views,
as delivered through her strong Russian accent and cigarette-scorched voicebox.

So …Ayn Rand.

Some people have
problems with her Objectivist philosophy. Others take issue with her
Godlessness. Still other criticize her characters and her writing. But why on earth do I never hear one word about her love scenes? She’s got a little bit of a rape fantasy
she’s trying to work through, and to me at least, it’s a little unsettling. And
the exchange on the subject of love embedded above (about 8:00 in) doesn't exactly help. In case you didn’t
watch to the end, here is the excerpt I’m talking about:

Rand: You love only those who deserve it.

Wallace: And then, if a man is weak, or a woman is
weak, then she is beyond, he is beyond, love?

Rand: He certainly doesn’t deserve it. He
certainly is beyond- he can always correct it. Man has free will. If a man
wants love, he should correct his weaknesses or his flaws, and he may deserve
it. But he cannot expect the unearned, either in love, or in money; either in method
or in spirit.

Wallace: But you have lived in our world and you
realize, recognize the fallibility of human beings. There are very few of us,
then, in this world, by your
standards, who are worthy of love.

Friday, April 20, 2012

That’s how this famous first line appears in the original French. It’s a line that has been translated a number of different ways throughout the years:

"For a long time I used to go to bed early." (C. K. Scott Moncrieff)

"For a long time I would go to bed early." (D J Enright)

"For a long time, I went to bed early." (Lydia Davis)

Then again, it’s from a book whose translated title is still the subject of some debate. It’s an interesting first line, in that it serves as the opening salvo for the novel Swann’s Way, as well as the introduction to Proust’s seven-volume masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time (or Remembrance of Things Past, if you prefer that title).

In either case, it’s a deceptively short and straightforward opening into a work whose later sentences can seem like veritable labyrinths to an overwhelmed reader. You’ll feel like a world-class hurdler as you learn to work your way over dependent clause after dependant clause, keeping your eye on the subject and racing in search of its main predicate ten lines down the page. Frankly, it’s a bit of a mess before you get used to it.

Still, I don’t know if I’ve read many books that reached me on quite so deep a level, or many authors who are quite so precise or so thorough in getting their meanings across. And I think the extremely personal nature of the prose starts in that very first line.

Anyone read it? Did you like it? Hate it? Toss it of with ambivalence? I’d be interested to hear.

Thursday, April 19, 2012

There
are some among our readership who really have it in for E.M. Forster (what
gives?), but we hope you’ll bear with us as we review that author’s A Room With A View.

The
book was my first introduction to Forster, and I have to say that I came away
generally pleased. It’s not a read that will keep you on the edge of your seat-
its major plot points are conversations, betrayals of confidence, and rumors about
who will rent the vacant cottage at such and such a place. But if it won’t keep
you on the edge of your seat, I think there’s enough to keep you in your seat- to keep you reading right
to the very end.

Now,
it is at its core, a romance. This means that the story is wholly dependent on
a simple misunderstanding between the two principle characters stretching the entire
length of the book. If George an Lucy were able at any moment to actually sit
down and have a half-way decent conversation, there would be no story. But true
to form, they aren’t; and so there is. Fine.

But
here’s where Forster really whimps out: The tension builds and builds (Will
Lucy end her engagement to Cecil? Is George’s father really a murderer? Did
George not only steal a kiss, but blabber about it to a popular novelist?) We
anxiously await the moment when George and Lucy do finally hash things out, when she realizes that she loves him
and always has- but just at the crucial moment- Forster fumbles the ball! He hits
the fast forward button and next thing you know, George and Lucy are back in
Florence, reminiscing about the winding road that brought them back there. No
catharsis, just a few loose ends tied up after the fact. It’s as if he thought that scene
would be really difficult to write, so he played it out off-stage. It was a bit
of a disappointment.

Still,
there is a lot of beautiful writing, some great characters and nice settings. And he presents enough interesting
insights into love and happiness and religion to have earned a second read from
me. So, for the Forster fans out there: where should I go next? Howard’s End? Or A Passage To India?

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Often,
when the subject of film adaptations comes up, we hear the familiar refrain “Yeah,
but the book was better.” But what do we say when the reverse is true- when a
book began life as a movie or a screenplay? Here are three such books that are
well worth your time.

The Human
Comedy, by William Saroyan:

Hired
by MGM to write the screenplay for this project, Saroyan was eventually removed
after refusing to compromise on the length. While Louis B. Mayer pushed forward
on the film version, Saroyan raced to publish his longer version first, as a novel.
It’s a short, breezy read… for a book, if not for a screenplay.

Dances
With Wolves, by Michael Blake:

Kevin
Costner fell in love with this spec-script sometime in the mid-eighties, but
Blake had a hard time selling it to anyone. Costner encouraged him to turn it
into a novel, with the hopes that it would improve his chances at a sale.
Released as a paperback in 1988, Costner finally bought the rights himself. The
rest is history. The film won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture in
1990.

No
Country For Old Men, by Cormack McCarthy:

Originally
penned as a screenplay, McCarthy had little luck in selling this story to
Hollywood. As an accomplished novelist, he didn’t need Kevin Costner to tell
him to turn it into a novel, which he did in 2005. Enter the Coen brothers, who
faithfully adapted the book back into a screenplay in 2007. Four Academy
Awards, including Best Picture, were the result.

It’s an interesting subject. I know Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy started
life as a radio play. (The Infinite Improbablility Drive was Adams’s ingenious
way of extending a story he thought was already over.) Certainly in the cases
of Dances With Wolves and No Country For Old Men, I think it’s probably
safe to say that “the movie was better than the book.” Anyone know of any others?

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

As a follow-up to yesterday’s review I thought I’d give you a taste of Jennifer Egan’s style. One of the things that struck me about Goon Squad was her ability to be colorful without being florid. Her descriptions are filled with everyday language that still manages to paint a vivid picture. Here are just a few passages that hit me where it counts (as usual, all emphasis is mine):

They sink onto the sand, still faintly warm, radiating a lunar glow.

The palm trees make a slapping, rainy sound, but the air is dry.

Sasha gathered up her ubiquitous black bag, a shapeless wishing well from which she'd managed to wrest whatever file or number or slip of paper he'd needed for the past twelve years.

The sun rose, big and shiny and round, like an angel lifting her head. I’d never seen it so brilliant out there. Silver poured over the water.

The blinds of his loft were up and a tinge of shower humidity hung in the air, pleasantly cut by the smell of brewing coffee.

Bosco brought Stephanie coffee and then began a juddering emersion into his chair, which suctioned around him in a gelatinous grip.

An unsuccessful hip replacement had left him with the lurching, belly-hoisting walk of a refrigerator on a hand truck.

Kitty came toward him slowly- poured toward him, really, that was how smoothly she moved in her sage green dress, as if the jerking awkwardness of walking were something she’d never experienced.

That is some good stuff. It seems there’s a certain magic in backloading your sentences- sticking the most memorable phrases and descriptions on the tail end for maximum impact.

Monday, April 16, 2012

I had a hard time believing that I would enjoy A Visit from the Goon Squad half as much as book bloggers, reviewers and members of the Pulitzer Prize Board seemed to think I should. In fact, I was ready to cry foul after the first couple pages, where I encountered parentheses in nearly every paragraph, suspiciously effeminate descriptors like “silvery” and “spiky-haired” and gag-inducing phrases like, “not a bangle jangled.” Blast them all, I thought to myself, I’ve been lured straight into a chick-lit booby trap.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Turns out Egan was just playing with characterization- something she does extremely well. The first chapter introduces us to a kleptomaniac record-producer’s assistant, but from there the book branches out and explores the world of her boss and his broken family, her boss’s mentor and his even brokener family, as well as the friendships and falling-outs that shaped the lives of each of the main characters from the beginning.

It’s a collection of interconnected tales that unfold in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, with some Italian ghettos and African Bush thrown in for good measure. Each of the stories could easily stand on its own, but together they read like a rangy, meandering novel that explores a number of different viewpoints, characters and timeframes along the way.

Egan does an incredible job of immersing us in the lives of her characters and making their every interaction an exciting new piece of the puzzle. And even when I had my guard up for gimmicks, she seemed to pull them off effortlessly. A chapter written in second person? Recipe for disaster. Yet there we are, drowning in the East River as a doped-up, college-aged, closeted homosexual. Seventy-five straight pages of Powerpoint slides? Again, I was ready for the worst. But Egan crafts a believable narrative out of the dribs and drabs of a teenaged girl’s unorthodox diary.

The last chapter may be the most unconventional of all, but I won’t say any more, for fear of spoiling the read for others. (Still, if anyone knows where I can get a Scotty Haussman Concert T-shirt, I’d certainly like to hear from you.) But do yourself a favor and check out A Visit from the Goon Squad.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Well,
the days are getting longer and before we know it summer will be upon us. It’s
not too early to start planning your next foray into the wilderness. 100BestBooks pointed us to this tent available at Field Candy:

That’s
pretty cool. Of course, the slightly more ambitious, slightly less water-proof option
is to build your own book igloo. It’s a bit heavier to pack in and a little
more labor intensive to set up, but we think you'll agree that it's infinitely cooler, if you can pull it off:

Saturday, April 14, 2012

As is often the case, one good thing usually leads us to another. Last weekend we shared a short video retelling Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea in a series of stop-motion hand drawings.

Now we’ve discovered the amazing animated short below. Created over the course of two years by artist Alexandr Petrov, this paint-on-glass animation netted Petrov the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 1999. The original film runs about 20 minutes, but this 8-minute version still captures the major plot points of The Old Man and the Sea. And it’s gorgeous to look at:

Friday, April 13, 2012

This week's first line comes from a novel that finds itself in my list of the ten greatest novels I've ever read. And from what I can tell, it's somewhat unknown. In the very least, I wouldn't consider it prominent. The line is from Ivan Doig's 1987 novel, Dancing At The Rascal Fair (which is a title that I dislike, but the novel is very good). Here is the first line:

"To say the truth, it was not how I expected - stepping off toward America past a drowned horse."

Has anyone out there ever read Ivan Doig, or more specifically, Dancing at the Rascal Fair? I've encountered very few who have. If you haven't, please do so.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

I
was just getting ready to type up a short review of E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View, when I stumbled upon
these excerpts I had highlighted during my read. I love how Forster gives life
to inanimate objects (his face “sprang into tenderness” or “battalions of black
pines witnessed the change”) and just as easily turns human characters into inanimate
works of art (“She saw him once again at Rome, on the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel…”).

But
I think my favorite passage is the third one below. It also happens to be the central plot point of the book. The
image of violets running like liquid color is something that has stayed with me
since I finished the book last fall. It’s beautiful stuff. All emphasis below
is mine- they’re just the lines that knocked me senseless.

She
watched the singular creature pace up and down the chapel. For a young man his
face was rugged, and--until the shadows fell upon it--hard. Enshadowed, it sprang into tenderness. She saw him
once again at Rome, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, carrying a burden of
acorns. Healthy and muscular, he yet gave her the feeling of greyness, of
tragedy that might only find solution in the night. The feeling soon passed; it
was unlike her to have entertained anything so subtle. Born of silence and of unknown emotion, it passed when Mr. Emerson
returned, and she could re-enter the
world of rapid talk, which was alone familiar to her.

She
could not complete it, and looked out
absently upon Italy in the wet. The whole life of the South was
disorganized and the most graceful
nation in Europe had turned into formless lumps of clothes. The street and
the river were dirty yellow, the bridge was dirty gray, and the hills were
dirty purple.

Light
and beauty enveloped her. She had fallen onto a little open terrace, which was
covered with violets from end to end. From her feet the ground sloped sharply
into view and violets ran down in
rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, heading
round the tree stems, collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass
with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion. This terrace was the well-head, the primal
source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth. Standing at its brink
like a swimmer who prepares, was the “good man.” But he was not the good man
she had expected, and he was alone. George had turned at the sound of her
arrival. For a moment he contemplated her as one who had fallen out of heaven.
He saw a radiant joy in her face. He saw
the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them
closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her.

In
the Weald, autumn approached, breaking up the
green monotony of summer, touching the parks with the gray-blue of mist,
the beech trees with russet, the oak trees with gold. Up on the heights battalions of black pines witnessed the
change, themselves unchangeable. Either country was spanned by a cloudless
sky and in either arose the tinkle of church bells.

Lucy’s
Sabbath was generally of this amphibious nature. She kept it without hypocrisy in the morning, and broke it without
reluctance in the afternoon.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Today we throw another month in the ol’ archive and celebrate our best traffic stats to date. Thanks to all of you who drop by sporadically, to the diehards who check in every day, and to those who take the time to comment and to link to us across the interwebs. Whatever your interest in this site, we love that you’re here. Come back soon, and come back often.

We’ve covered some great writers in the past 29 days, as you can see in the word cloud above. As usual, here are the ten strangest search terms that led people here, along with the links to whatever they found:

Once you noticed
the bakery box
under my arm, your
face calmed—
my earlier whereabouts
evidenced in
sweetness
we would fork from
the same plate.

This
is a great little poem. I love how the first four stanzas start out slowly,
just snapshots and observations from a lengthy stroll, and then in the final
three stanzas we get a series of images that hone in on something very personal.
Still, until those final few lines, you get the sense that the whole thing is
centered on the narrator.

But
the last stanza turns the aimless loafer into a romantic hero. It suddenly
becomes a statement about a couple’s intimacy. And those last three lines are
worth the price of admission alone:

“my
earlier whereabouts

evidenced in sweetness

we would fork from the same plate”

Very
good, no? Have you had your socks knocked off by a good poem lately? Share them
in the comments.

Monday, April 9, 2012

I’ve talked about my interactions with lending libraries here. But in today’s post, I thought we’d strike out a little farther afield. I’m talking about the lending library at the Amundsen-Scott Research Station at the South Pole.

As background, let me just say that I’m an unabashed blog voyeur (there’s probably a post of its own in that statement, but I’ll save that for another day.) I rarely, if ever, reach out to these internet authors on whom I drop in unannounced (the same way the vast majority of you will never leave a comment here), but every once in a while you come upon a question that tickles your curiosity- one that you’ll likely never get answered if you don’t just go ahead and ask it. So that’s what I did.

I wanted to learn something about the reading life for Winter-overs at the South Pole. How much people read, what kinds of things they read, whether any book-clubs or literary discussions pop up during those long, dark days at the station, etc. So I emailed the author of this blog to find out. Here's her very interesting reply:

"The winter-over reading life tends to be a personal one. We have a "library" with books filed by category and author, books are free to take or add at will. There's also an unorganized huge bookshelf in one of the lounges. That one tends to be paperbacks in the sci-fi/mystery dept, or bestsellers like Grisham and Dan Browns.

"But in my two winters no organized reading groups. Largely I found that it was hard to maintain enough mental wherewithal to read books during the deep darkness of winter. There are rarely multiple copies of books and if we had to wait for all the interested winter-overs to finish a book before discussing it...well...it'd never happen. And it never does. Occasionally you run into someone who has read the same book as you and you talk about it. Or you pass on a good book to someone then talk about it, but rarely if never anything organized.

"The collection of books is pretty much whatever has been donated, or brought down and then left behind over the years. There's a good collection of Antarctic history books, including a fair number of rare books, locked away. But the key is easy to get. You get the DaVinci Codes, the Oprah book clubs, and then some real oddities that show up. But usually a fair number of good ones.

"I found reading to be really challenging in my winters. Maintaining the focus was hard. I reached a point where I couldn't even finish a movie on my laptop, and a 30 min TV show on DVD was often too much too. Just lost focus. If there had been The New Yorker magazine I think I could've finished articles about that long, but then again, maybe not.

"A lot of people are starting to read on e-readers, which makes the lending and leaving behind of good books less likely. I wonder how that'll have an impact on books available in the library.

"We also tend to stay away from challenging topics in the effort to make the winter easier to survive. And books, even fiction, can be controversial. You have to believe everyone is after your best interests and will work towards the station's survival if the shit hits the fan during the winter, and book discussions can make it pretty clear just how opposite people you have to live with are. Small community, best to just pretend sometimes."

Fascinating stuff, is it not? Here's an inside shot of the station, courtesy of the information superhighway:

Sunday, April 8, 2012

We
made a suggestion the other day that Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea was
a nice, short introduction to the world of classic literature. Below, you’ll
find a nice, short introduction to that nice, short introduction. Enjoy.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

After making you wade through ten paragraphs of personal history yesterday, it feels like a good time for another author look-alike post. Our first attempt can be found here and, as always, we’ll post these side-by-sides in the forum, where you’re free to add some of your own.

First up, we have a short-haired Nathan Englander and Robert Downey Jr.:

Not to be outdone, long-haired Nathan Englander teams up with saxophonist Kenny G:

Then there’s Franz Kafka and that kid from “Hook” (Charlie Korsmo):

And by my reckoning, the only thing separating Steven Millhauser from Larry David, is about 8 weeks of mustache:

Philip Roth strikes a “Kramer-esque” pose that might as well be Michael Richards:

And finally, it would be easy to double-down on the "8 weeks of mustache" joke here, but because she's still living I'll forego it. I give you the late Kurt Vonnegut and nonagenarian Phyllis Diller:

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

In yesterday’s post, Tucker pinpointed the exact instant he became a serious reader. Others may have had similar epiphanies or “a-ha” moments, but my journey was a little more drawn out. For me, there was no single spark. But looking back, there are a few obvious flashpoints that set me on my way. If you want the one paragraph version, I’ll refer you to our ‘About Us’ page. But if you have time for the full monty, read on.

One of my earliest milestones was reading A Taste of Blackberries by Doris Buchanan Smith. I still remember being struck by the death of the narrator’s best friend. I even remember where I was when I read it. That a book could do more than entertain, that it could really work through some serious stuff, (and that a person could die of something as innocent as a bee sting) was all a revelation to me. It hadn’t really been done in a kids book before. I mean, sure, Charlotte’s Web had done it. But Charlotte was a spider. What kid hadn’t seen a dead spider before? Who gets all broken up about losing a spider? But this was different. This was a book that made me think.

I continued to read for pleasure, The Bobbsey Twins, the Boxcar Children, some Roald Dahl and Beverly Cleary, and a lot of biographies in monochrome canvas library bindings. Nothing yet that could be called great literature. But my first big setback was about to rear its head. I still wonder what genius decided to greet the newly-arrived 7th graders of Clayton Jr. High with Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, but that’s precisely what they did. Some of my classmates may have benefitted from that first assigned reading, but I certainly wasn’t ready for it. It would become the first in a long line of assigned texts I would avoid like the plague.

A broken leg in my freshman year would put me back on track, removing the possibility of any regular, afterschool high-jinks and paving the way for me to actually tackle Great Expectations in my new-found free time. The mystery of Pip’s unknown benefactor pulled me through what would become my first novel-length reading assignment actually fulfilled. It was a proud moment. Still, when my afternoons were once again filled with sports and aimless wandering, good books fell by the way-side.

A series of painful reading experiences followed. The Scarlet Letter, Beowulf, The Sound and the Fury, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man… There are too many to name. All of them unread to this day. In that period though, I remember one experience that was similar to the one Tucker described. I sauntered into class one-day, and the kid next to me was reading For Whom the Bell Tolls while he waited for the bell to ring. Who did he have for English, I asked. He answered. I hadn’t seen anybody else reading that book- were they reading it in class? No, he answered. You mean, you’re just reading it for fun- by choice? Mmm-hmm. Is it any good? Mmm-hmm.

He was probably either annoyed or embarrassed under my questioning, but I was trying to make sense of the following:

a) why someone my age would fill their free time, by choice, with a literary classic, b) what kind of book was so interesting that one would read it even during the 10 minute intervals between classes, andc) what great secrets were being kept from me by my insistence that these books were outside my reach?

I didn’t immediately find the answers to those questions, but they did come eventually. So Nathaniel Schaeffer, wherever you are, I owe you one.

AP English awaited me in my senior year, and for the first time we were expected to read a book over the summer and turn in a paper before slackers like me could leach onto any sort of in-class discussion to pick-up the salient points. I would actually have to read the book. As it turned out, Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison was the highlight of my high-school English career. I loved that book. It was interesting, it was about something, and it even carried off the kind of heart-pounding ending I had only read in thrillers.

Still, I wasn’t fully converted. One thing held me back. I always was, and am today, an atrociously slow reader. A life filled with great and important books would surely be a painful one. I needed one final catalyst to make me a serious reader, and that would come in college.

I lived on campus, but got a job at the airport. My wife was commuting to another school, 45 miles away, which left me without a car for most of the week. This meant a train ride downtown, a bus ride to the airport, and a shuttle to my actual work location. Now, some people can study while commuting like this. But trying to juggle gigantic O-Chem textbooks, a notepad, a calculator, a sandwich, and pens and highlighters, I could not. What could I do on this daily odyssey? I could read. And read I did.

I soon found that it wasn’t literature itself that had aggravated me for years, but the deadlines, quizzes, papers and essay answers that my K-12 education had married to it. Freed from the constraints of all that garbage, I found that even the “great” books were, well… pretty darn great. They’ve been my first literary love ever since.

How about the rest of you? Was there one moment for you? Or was becoming “a discerning reader” a process?

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Is it possible that there is one singular moment when an individual ceases to be merely literate, and commences a sojourn much deeper than simple literacy? A moment in time when that person actually becomes a thoughtful, analytical, and persistent reader?

I would assume for many of us that the answer is “No, I became a reader over time.”

For me, the answer is different. Perhaps I am unique, but I can specifically pinpoint the exact moment in time when I consciously made the decision to forego mere literacy in favor of being a well-informed, enlightened, careful, thorough reader of great literature.

In 1998, I was living in the Gracia neighborhood of Barcelona (another story for another day).I was twenty years old. One particular autumn evening, I specifically remember sitting on the subway as it rumbled below La Rambla de Catalunya. I don’t remember where I was going. It was a beautiful evening, to be sure, but I felt bland and uninspired. Across from me on the metro was a girl, probably about my age, and most likely a university student. She probably wore a scarf and a long jacket with a shoulder bag (like most Catalan university girls), although I can’t remember.

What I do remember is sitting there just looking at her as the subway bumped along underground. She was reading.

I remember thinking to myself, “Hmmm, I wonder what she's getting out of that book?”

The book appeared to be a collection of Federico Garcia Lorca poetry. I remember that it had a classic black-and-white photo of the Spanish poet on the cover, and he seemed to be staring at me, and I stared back.

And then I remember thinking, “She’s surely getting more out of that book than I am getting out of my current state of doing nothing.”

And then, “Come to think of it, I see all of these Barcelona university students reading all of the time!”

And then, “Wait a minute! The fact that all of these Barcelona residents enlighten their minds by reading constantly, whereas I do not, seems unjust.”

And then, as I stared at the girl across from me, “But, I too could be reading that book of Lorca poetry in order to similarly enlighten my experience and my mind.”

And at that very moment, I became a well-informed, enlightened, careful, thorough reader of literature. I remember it well, as if some forgotten component of my mind just took over from that point. Not long thereafter, I started with Don Quixote de la Mancha (and found that it did enlighten my experience and my mind), and then Dandelion Wine, The Sun Also Rises, A Room With a View, On The Road, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Human Stain, East of Eden, Angle of Repose, The Good Earth, House of Spirits, The Monkey Wrench Gang, Crime And Punishment, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Chosen, Stones for Ibarra, The Great Gatsby, The Stranger, Herzog, and on and on and on and on and on.

With each novel that I read, I felt a sense of empowerment. I felt that I had been given inside information about the social intricacies of human nature. I felt my mind growing in intelligence. So I kept reading through my college years, and then through law school, and marriage, and young children, and home ownership, and right through an otherwise normal trajectory for a young American male.

Now I read because it’s who I am. And as Ralph Waldo Emerson so aptly stated: “A Man is known by the books he reads.”

But for me, it all began on that autumn evening as I pondered the value that a young Barcelona university student derived from reading poetry on the subway.